Since I am now the proud owner of not only a serger (!) but also a dress form (!!) the time was ripe for me to lay down my knitting needles and start feeling up my Blue Lady.

My plan: to make a little scoopneck T-shirt to wear under my cardigans. The flaw? I had no knit yardage. The solution? A pile of Iain’s old undershirts.

I cut off the neck and sleeves and down one side, leaving an irregularly shaped but usable piece of feathersoft cotton jersey. (“Feathersoft cotton jersey” sounding much nicer than “ratty old tee with baby spitup stains on the shoulder”.) I did this to three shirts, since I needed one each for front, back, and two long sleeves and since some of those stains made part of a front or back unusable.

Of course, it’s important to iron your work. It’s stupid to work on crinkled material. (It’s also stupid to leave the iron set too long on your material while you take a photo, since cotton will scorch if left unattended.) (Ask me how I know.)

Then it was time to cut out the pattern. I worked loosely from the size S crewneck T-shirt in Wendy Mullins’ “Sew U Home Stretch.” I copied the pattern to freezer paper (EXCELLENT for copying patterns), altering the neckline width and depth and adding a few inches length. To the sleeves, I added about 12” length and tapered it in about 2 inches on each side. If I had it to do again, I’d add a little extra room to the hips and a little extra length to the sleeves and no way in hell would I chop that much width off the neckline.

I carefully folded the fabric pieces along the vertical grainline and made sure there was enough room for the whole pattern piece. If there was, I was in business. As an extra timesaving shortcut, I always put the hem edge of the pattern piece on top of the already sewn hem of the old T-shirt, to avoid that step later on. This does cause a little weirdness when you’re sewing seams past a pre-sewn hem, but I quickly got over it.

Since knits are floppy and freezer paper is awesome, I lightly ironed the freezer paper pattern to the material and then transferred my marks, clipping triangle points to the outside (instead of my usual shortcut clips to the seam allowance), and cut out.

Repeat for each pattern piece.

Then I peeled off the paper and sewed ‘em together.

Imagine that I had the foresight to photograph myself serging the seams right about … here. Doh.

The awesome part about serging is that those seams really do look professional. The non awesome part about using a serger is that, although you can do a serged edge or a roll edge, you can’t any kind of regular topstitching. Wendy Mullins suggests finishing the neckline of this top with a serged edge and then folding it over once and topstitching it down. I topstitched with my regular machine on a medium zig-zag stitch and oh mama, was that awful.

Um, wave much?

So folded it all under a second time and did a straight-stitch top stitch, which corrected it somewhat, but took the already wide neck right up to the shoulder seam, leaving me quite Flashdance.

Sexy bathroom homemade T-shirt bra strap picture. Oh yeah.

So. There it is! A free T-shirt, and I got to practice my serger AND dress my life-size doll. I don’t know about you but that sure is my idea of a good time.

So, shall we grade my effort?

• for purposes of wearability, the Jennifer Beals neckline gives it -100 points.
• But the fact that I made it myself and can wear it to bed (while dancing?) gives it +101 points.
• The fact that I made it in two hours gives it +57 points
• The fact that it’s made out of old T-shirts gives it -83 points for style and klassiness and +83 points for eco greeniness and also a bonus point for cheap.
• For those of you counting at home: that=Win.

I next plan to buy some actual cotton jersey and tweak the pattern so that Round Two of the T-shirt comes out awesome. If it does, then I duplicate it a couple times and take some RIT dye to them, and devise my own T-shirt wardrobe, thereby putting the Gap out of business. You’ve been warned, Gap. You’ve been warned.